The Literary Life of Things

Case Studies in American Fiction

Babette Bärbel Tischleder

Cite this publication as

Babette Bärbel Tischleder, The Literary Life of Things (2014), Campus Frankfurt / New York, 60486 Frankfurt/Main, ISBN: 9783593422954

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Description / Abstract

Whether in the street or the microcosm of the home, the life of things conjoins human subjects and inanimate objects. Engaging a great range of American literature—from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton to Vladimir Nabokov and Jonathan Franzen—the book illuminates scenes of animation that disclose the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of our entanglement with the material world.

Description

Babette Bärbel Tischleder ist Professorin für Nordamerikastudien an der Universität Göttingen.

Table of content

  • BEGINN
  • Contents
  • Abbreviations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction: Lively Objects†”Scenes of Animation and the American Literary Imagination
  • 1. Sentimental Patina: The Ideal Ecology of Objects in Harriet Beecher Stowe†™s House and Home Papers
  • “The Ravages of a Carpet†: Novelty vs. Tradition
  • The Culture of Things: Morality vs. Anthropology
  • Sentimental Possession: An Anthropological Perspective
  • A Domestic World of Animate Things: Stowe†™s Culture of Comfort
  • The Moral Lesson of Furniture: Against a World Robbed of Living Things
  • Criticism and Prospects
  • Sentimental Patina
  • 2. Sacred Objects, Freakish Ornaments: Domestic Environmentalism in the Gilded Age
  • A Home Hallowed by Religion: Stowe†™s Parlor Piety
  • Horace Bushnell, Pierre Bourdieu, and Domestic Environmentalism
  • Christian Commodities
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman†™s Disenchanted Vision of Home
  • Expressive Things, Impressionable Children
  • Gothic Things and Literary Houses
  • Yellow Environments, Vicious Storytelling
  • Nerves and Decoration
  • Home Influence and Domestic Mythology in the Post-Darwinian Age
  • Mental Myopia: From the Sanctuary to the Coop
  • 3. The Scent of Things: Edith Wharton, Modern Subjectivity, and the Anatomy of Taste
  • The Self in/as a Cluster of Things: Metonymy and Modern Subjectivity
  • The Flower in the Hothouse: Lily†™s Sensuous Nobility
  • The Scent of Things: Object Lessons and the Kinship of Taste
  • The Smell of Things
  • A Last Touch of Intimacy
  • 4. Object Trouble: Thing Theory, Vladimir Nabokov†™s Pnin, and the American Tradition of Recalcitrant Matter
  • Thing Theory, Philosophy, Satire: From Existentialism to Resistentialism
  • “Look at the Darned Thing†: Buster Keaton†™s One Week
  • Recalcitrance by Human Design
  • Pnin: The American Scene in the 1950s
  • Pninizing
  • A Strange World of American Things
  • Matters of Affection
  • Conclusion: Recalcitrance Revisited
  • 5. The Thingness of the Text: Jonathan Franzen†™s Rhopography of Obsolescence
  • The Matter of Obsolescence
  • Realism and Rhopography
  • The Blue Chair and the Tangibility of Things
  • The Matter of Entropy
  • Cultural Wars and the Empire of the Ephemeral
  • Existential Obsolescence
  • Unloved Objects
  • Negative Authenticity – Abject Realness
  • The Cluttered Text
  • Lists as Literary Still Lifes
  • Epilogue: The Afterlife of Things
  • Bibliography
  • Primary Works
  • Art, Photography, Film
  • Criticism and Theory
  • Index

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